Jemima Kirke
By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 9 years ago

Watch: Actress Jemima Kirke talks about her abortion

Joining the growing trend of public abortion stories, Girls actress Jemima Kirke tells her story of getting an abortion in college in this new PSA for the Center for Reproductive Rights’ Draw The Line campaign. 

As Kirke points out, the tricky thing about abortion rights in 2015 — or 2007 when she got hers — is that abortion is “not completely unavailable” but “there are these little hoops we have to jump through to get them.” For Kirke, as a college student who couldn’t tell her mother, the cost was just barely doable — she emptied her checking account, got a portion from her boyfriend, and skipped the anesthesia to make it work.

And for other women, of course, those hurdles — the cost, the long distance to the clinic, waiting periods that require multiple days off from work — may actually be too much.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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